Do I just keep saying the same things as if we are in a chronic hysteresis?

I don’t think I’m going to come across as chipper in this post. I can’t be mister positivity 100% of the time [… uh …].

I’m not as engaged with local cons. When you ponder which DDC’s were more memorable out of 20+, it’s not like there isn’t a been there, done that aspect to it. Why don’t I feel the same way about Gen Con when I play HoR a lot and may end up playing the same systems over and over, like Four Colours Al Fresco for a while or Feng Shui or whatever?

Because in person play of HoR locally is very different from in person play of HoR at Gen Con, for instance. At GC, you get the core players and people who put thought into metagaming the campaign, even if it’s just deciding how to form Battle Interactive tables. I’ve never played any 4CAF outside of GC, nor any Babylon RPG, etc.

KublaCon is more interesting to me from a gaming standpoint because I get to play card game events that don’t exist outside of the con, e.g. Shadowfist tournaments. Have to defend my title as Classic Champion for the sixth largest economy in the world this year, for instance.

But, let’s get back to DDC.

No hotel this year. While I didn’t mind driving back and forth in the moment, I needed a break and DDC wasn’t much of a vacation. Now, my first vacation of the year is coming up soon … At some point, get on topic.

I skipped Friday because, sincerely, I’m not in the mood to game Friday nights at cons after being at work much of the day. It’s just a desire for a mental break. Now, I’m willing to game if there’s something I’m particularly interested in playing, but there are few things I’m particularly interested in playing. Again, RPG events may sound good, but I’ve had the spectrum from amazing to atrocious, from excellent to bad, from solid to mediocre, unforgettable to forgettable. I am more likely to enjoy playing than thinking about the possibility of playing. It’s like how I have no problem working out but hate thinking about working out so I hardly ever initiate the exercise.

Also, I don’t think my friends and gaming associates realize how little I have always been interested in quick games or pick up games or whatever. I invest in certain games (or types of games) and want to play those a lot, and I play what other people want to play that doesn’t feel like it will be a drag. I’ll demo games I haven’t played, but I don’t go out of my way to do so unless they have a hook that is extra hooky for me. I’d much rather talk about a game that interests me or even hear someone’s review of a game that doesn’t interest me than play filler games.

Saturday, I get in a bit after 7:30AM and find ample parking at the hotel. I get my usual breakfast from Bagel Street Cafe of pastrami and swiss on a poppy seed bagel (because they don’t have the bread rolls baked yet) with a large peach smoothie with whip cream.

Bagel Street Cafe. It’s a chain. I don’t think I’ve ever been to one other than in San Ramon. There’s one in the shopping center where I get my hair cut and I’m not entirely sure where it is. Yet, conwise, I’d be happy to eat twice a day at the place with the occasional dinner somewhere outside of the adjacent shopping center where I can get a burger or fish and chips or whatever.

I show up like 8:30AM for my 10AM Traveller demo. Try to work on my piracy deck for a Developer’s Corner article on travellerccg.com and fail to make much progress as people are already showing up to demo the game. Demoing happens, with Jeff leading. It’s only 2 hours for the event, but we continue demoing for another 2 hours. Then, food, or, as I like to call it, smoothie number two, berry [blackberry?] smoothie this time.

Saturday night is V:TES, which is a couple of games. We call the second game after my Hermana Mayor deck has gotten a VP from my prey’s Anarch Revolts and ousts a second player, while my grandpredator finally stealth bleeds out my predator. The first game was a spin on Hatchling.dec where I had .5 VPs at time and 3 VPs playing the game out with Arika as my predator and my Aus/Pre/Vic bruise bleed deck as prey. Sucked up a bunch of Starvations of Marena, but my prey decked.

Not home too late … if I wasn’t old and decrepit.

Sunday, roll in an hour later as I didn’t get out of bed at 5:20AM to build decks, like I did on Saturday. Get the strawberry smoothie and am pleased with it, as well. Which to get Monday? Which?

Demo, similar structure, different people, at 10AM. Then, tournament time. Time for ruthless beats. Time for glory, honor, status, and swag. Except, I’m one of the guys who made the game, so like none of those apply.

Match 1:

I’m playing against a precon. I’m not winning. I then have a crazy complicated turn after having relatively straightforward turns earlier. Oh, I’m playing my Prepared Scout deck from my website article, with a few adjustments to the crew and maybe one or two other cards.

I have a Body Pistol in play and shoot Rika Honami. I Freelancer Flint into play and jettison her. I have played a SureShot Missile Turret and Just a Little Longer … another SureShot Missile Turret and I Glitch one of my Turrets to reuse it so that I do 6 or whatever damage as a pirate to bankrupt my opponent. May not sound that intense, but I think also Freelancered another crew in play for some reason and used my Starship Graveyard to get back one of those Turrets.

As usual, I was virtually bankrupt myself. A Scout may always be prepared, but this Scout is always poor.

If I hadn’t taken out Rika, he might have completed his contract and won.

Now, I think I only won – not because my constructed deck was the wasp’s elbows – because I understood the game far better than someone who just started playing in the Sunday demo.

Match 2:

Paired off with another 1-0 player, some guy named Jeff who has played the game before. This was a very casual event due to people kind of getting in late and not being quite sure who was playing. He got out to a lead. At a certain point, he was up 13-11 in VPs. Then, his friend showed up who was planning on playing and took over.

On the penultimate round, I went for a big contract to try to get 6 VPs and win. I got 5. I had numerous ways to get 6, but I had two cards left in my hand and none in my deck and didn’t have the money to play both cards or play one and use my Luxury Suite for the 20th VP. I was ready to concede as I thought that round was my only chance, as bankruptcy or my opponent getting to 20 seemed inevitable. With one card left, we went to the next round. I used my last card to jump to a cheap survey contract. With zero cards in hand or deck, with two crew who would have been jettisoned if my opponent had not healed each for one damage for amusement value, I scored three more VPs and my opponent got stopped by my deck that doesn’t actually interact hardly at all with my opponent (except when I can pirate on the last round for the kill) because he didn’t choose to gain Survey with the Empress Marava Far Trader during the resource phase and my last complication play was Electro-Magnetic Interference. Of course, if he had pirated me, I was dead.

In other words, if Jeff had played the game out entirely, he would have been 2-0 instead of me.

At this point can make a point by pointing out that knowledge of games is really helpful in games that aren’t luckfests of lucksackiness. Many, many plays could have prevented me from winning, but, when you get dumped into the middle of a game that you aren’t particularly familiar with and are playing against someone who helped create the game, sometimes you don’t win.

Match 3:

During the second round, I had more than 30 cards in my discard pile. In two rounds, I played or used about two-thirds of my deck. That’s some two legit two spit right there.

I outraced my opponent who didn’t have enough ways to stop me from gaining VPs. He had a slow start and was way behind and only because I do a great job of getting close to bankruptcy did I manage to get to 21 VPs with only a couple of cards left.

My intention is to write a “takeaways” article for our website. An obvious takeaway is that knowledge of the game matters. And, this is good. It shows we came up with a game that rewards things that should be rewarded.

Another takeaway is that the precons are fairly playable. Only one other player built a deck and he was 0-2 after two rounds of playing against precons, finally getting his piracy deck to work in the third round.

Went to dinner at a Cajun place and I got boring Cajun Burger since I was in the mood for a burger.

At one point, Brad and I were talking about FCGs versus VCGs. We are VCG fans. Do I go into a rant now?

I guess. It seems gratuitous to rant in a separate post.

VCGs are better. Here’s why.

Complaint number one: I don’t get all of the cards when I buy random packs. If you want to get complete sets, go to eBay to get complete sets. If eBay doesn’t have them, reach out to the publisher or the player base and offer to buy complete sets. Meanwhile, without randomness, you lose sealed play outside of “duplicate”, draft play that is remotely interesting, and you even lose any interest in opening up any product since you know exactly what will be in there when you do. Well, okay, *I* lose interest in opening any product. As much as I often feel bad opening up boosters for games where I need copious numbers of certain cards, I also find it interesting to occasionally crack a booster, though more so with Magic where I don’t own all of the cards already.

Complaint number two: VCGs are too expensive compared to FCGs. If you are the type to buy three core sets of L5R and be satisfied, you aren’t playing a CCG, you are playing a boardgame with customization. You may feel differently, but that’s the way I feel. I consider the correct number of L5R core sets to be minimum 18. Every three core sets allows for two decks (with extras, of course). So, 18 core sets is 12 decks at once (in truth, slightly more because you will avoid splashing too much of the same thing because you crave variety). I’m a card flopper, 12 decks is a norm. I range from 7 decks to 22 decks built at once for most card games I play. I think I have around 20 Shadowfist decks built at the moment, about 12 V:TES decks (not counting decks for my limited collection experiment and the like), and only 4-5 L5R decks because I’m not taking L5R seriously yet. Not that it’s a fair comparison because my Magic decks are almost all Type P decks, but I have about a hundred of those built. Amazingly enough, 18 core sets is like $600-$700 plus getting like three copies of each expansion pack so that you have nine copies of every expansion card costs more money, though only nine copies of cards sounds rather low to me as some of those cards may go in every deck. Then, if you really aren’t into being able to build every deck possible for a game, like I am, pretty easy to play CCGs for free. Want to play Magic for free? Just ask people for their extra commons. Want to play V:TES for free, find me and I can hand over a thousand cards. Will you have exactly three copies of every card for a three card limit game? No. But, I imagine the only need to have such a collection is for tournament play, in which case can just borrow a deck. CCGs are about infinite variety. I embrace that. Hard for me to get into the mindset of only wanting to have like a thousand cards for a game, even if I’m also willing to play card games with only like a thousand card collection … up until the point that I end up with 20,000-40,000 cards.

Now, obviously, not everyone approaches gaming like I do, which is probably why I have this blog and not everyone who plays games has this same blog. I mean, look at the market – we never considered putting out Traveller as a VCG because I’m in some sort of minority based on visible opinion.

Get home early, watch some Olympics because freestyle skiing halfpipe qualification is interesting. Land high – ooh, not that high.

Monday is the key day. The day that doesn’t involve showing people how to play the greatest card game, no, the greatest game ever possibly thought of in all of the multiverses in all of time, even the funky nonlinear time(s). Monday is the day I decide to go with the berry smoothie again. Monday is the day I fail forwards …

Brad is running 2d20 Conan. For most of us, this is the first attack, the Pictish Frontier of Conan play, the day that ole Ian forgets to bring the character sheets he has been carrying around all weekend.

Character creation is involved. Already, the suffering. Plus, certain people, who shall remain nameless until I out him, did not back the Kickstarter and, thus, we are trying to learn how to play with four players and two core books.

Spoiler: we didn’t like the system. Now, we (most of us) played Conan d20 for like 9 years. Sure, it wasn’t perfect [see blog posts for mini rants], but it wasn’t hard to jump into. This was just hard. For some, the dicerolling wasn’t clear.

For me:

Antagonism

I read a long thread on rpg.net about Conan after I got home. There were posters who talked about how antagonistic the game feels with Doom Pool uses. I felt that in my half a session. Em, we didn’t finish an adventure because Brad got tired of trying to run the system and it was close to the end of the con. Now, I can’t say I’ve never felt like a GM was shutting me down when I wanted to do something, and maybe the adventure in the book just sucks, but I felt like there was way too much preventing us from doing things, which seems like the opposite of what narrative mechanics are intended for.

Complications

I grew so tired of these right quick. Because geniusness also can include overlooktheobviousness, I didn’t realize until our postgame analysis that the reason rolling 20’s comes up so much more often than d20 is because … er, 2d20 is twice as much as d20, while 3d20 is like more than twice as much as d20.

Fail forward, “yes, but”, complications – all of these strike me as actually getting in the way of just playing a game. They put more pressure on GMs and players to justify mechanics rather than just ad hocing on the fly as you are freewheeling … okay, okay, I’ll hinder myself.

Gamistier Than Thou

I’m going to pummel this live donkey in another classic gaming rant.

Narrativist mechanics aren’t narrativist – they are gamist. Because, pssst, let you in on a secret that nobody else can possibly derive – mechanics are gamist. “But, old, decrepit, get off my AD&D 1e lawn dude. You don’t understand gamist/simulationist/narrativist. You are going to be defeated once I enlighten you to the true RPG metaparadigm whatsit.”

The more you mechanize a game, the more the focus of the game shifts from story to mechanics. This is why I don’t like crunchy systems.

Before I forget, let me tell a story, like old, cranky people are wont to do. When Origins was in San Jose, I attended and I was introduced to Immortal: The Invisible War.

I played two sessions run by Ran Ackels, who some of you may know as the guy who created Immortal. I retain, in my feeble memory, a recollection that the way he ran these games was “Roll a die [d10], and I’ll tell you what happens.” That is narrativist play. Dice exist to give some level of randomness to short term results; as the party succeeds or fails at things in the short term, the long term is adjusted.

They don’t exist to be an economic engine. Momentum, Doom Points, Fortune, Complications are all mechanisms for having players and GM focus on and manipulate mechanics.

Do I hate Fortune? No. It’s obviously related to Bennies in Savage Worlds which I do pretty much hate (slightly). It reminds me of Fate Points in d20 Conan, Hero Points, and their ilk, which I actually like.

You know what else I like? When we played oConan, we got ladybugs (reroll for you) for writing fictions/session reports, spiders (+2 to roll) for bringing food, arrowheads (reroll for anyone, including NPCs and antagonists) for extra effort. Are these gamist in the way trying to maximize Momentum or trying to build Fortune is?

No.

They are modifications to existing rules, whereas Momentum is a subgame. This was my problem when I was exposed to Fate. I felt like Fate was far more gamey than d20. You do things not because you want to but because the *mechanics* of the game reward you for doing them. I’m now playing a game of manipulating mechanics rather than playing a game of seducing the immortal witch (“failed Diplomacy, reroll, reroll”).

Do I hate Doom/Momentum? *shrug* Maybe.

Accomplishment

Fail forward is, in other words, succeeding. If you can’t actually fail at whatever the adventure is supposed to be about, what sense of accomplishment do you get?

This is a tricky topic that I’ve touched on before – the topic of players feeling a sense of accomplishment. I worry about this when running systems where you either succeed at die rolls or fail at die rolls. Because I can’t escape the epiphany that what I enjoy as a player is feeling like failure was possible but not actually failing, so accomplishment is an illusion of perceived ability to be disaccomplishmentary.

In oConan, we failed. Oh, we succeeded fairly often, at times because of pulling a reroll out of our gamebags, at times probably because we weren’t doing something all that difficult, it just seemed difficult. But, we also straight up failed. We ran away from demons loosened. We ran away from Pict harriers. We Fate Pointed to be found on some island beach or in wreckage at sea or whatever that I no longer remember.

And, in seven years of one campaign, things moved forward and stories were told and retold. This is what the intent of these narrative mechanics is – stories move forward with setbacks until you climax [sic]. But, you don’t need that in any given session. You can get that across sessions to where a campaign isn’t some exercise of fudging [ha] results.

I don’t dislike the system (the part of the system that doesn’t involve Momentum, Doom, or Complications). Though, I’m trying to figure out how you can build a functional sorcerer in the beginning, which I guess I could go to the forums and read about. I just find it incredibly clunky and extremely gamey. Just the fact that PCs get to decide what order to take actions in is itself gamier than rolling initiative. Yes, it is. It becomes a subgame, and the more subgames you have, the more game you have.

There’s also way too much emphasis on equipment, with a lot of equipment being obscenely expensive. I bought a bow and that used up all but one of my gold. A crappy bow, by the way. This was something d20 did really well – outside of primary weapon, equipment was something you hardly paid any attention to. Sure, armor could be good, but armor could also suck.

I might get used to the economics of the subsystems of Momentum and Doom that are built into the system. I’m not sure I’ll ever think they add value to playing, but rewriting the game to take them out is a waste of time, when we could just go back to playing d20 or I could homebrew another Roll & Keep variant.

So, yeah, DunDraCon. It was good. Traveller isn’t perfect but playing Traveller gets me thinking more like a player of the game rather than being in developer/designer mode. I think about how the game has all of these cards that you want to play but can’t at the same time, which seems positive. Conan was something worth doing even if it wasn’t nearly as fun as our old convention sessions tended to be. I got to talk to people. I had four smoothies in three days, though the waistline impact is not a victory.

If only we could get more Traveller cards to the people who are enthused about playing. If only I was a beam of sunlight reflecting off of a unicorn’s horn during a musical on Christmas Eve. If only I remembered to pass the character sheets to Brad before Monday. If only I could remember what else I wanted to write about so that I could get to 4000 words in this post.

In recent days, it’s been mostly about Traveller. My friends and associates have been getting their Kickstarter rewards. Coworker showed me his stuff. Went up to Oakland the day after the Berkeley tournaments to help explain how Traveller works.

Then, we realized the printing issue where the crew skills lack clear silver and gold borders. That’s unfortunate. We had a summit to go over the plan for making things right and I would expect an update from Jeff on what Horizon Games is planning to do.

See, I may not be able to see things at a distance so well, especially writing on flat surfaces, as I didn’t wear glasses in college except when I was trying to read blackboards (yes, that old). But, I can still perceive small details, so I wasn’t that perturbed until a couple of things. One, the realization that I have a huge advantage over people seeing the cards for the first time because I largely know what the cards already do, including what levels of skills the crew have. Two, internal comments have been that the lack of clarity on the skills is a monumental deal.

Anyway, I didn’t post just to dwell on how many things can go wrong with publishing material. I’ve been building decks now that I have real cards and not just samples – something that only happened yesterday, days after other people got real cards. I’ve been answering questions on travellerccg.com‘s forums because I’m actually not just an authority but a “designer intent is this and since I’m a …” type person thingy. I usually eschew answering rules questions for card games because, as a player of those games, I never wanted some random playtester to tell me how something worked but wanted someone who decided what the rules are to tell me how something worked. Of course, I also happened to often be a random playtester myself.

Every once in a while I remind myself that: we put out a game. Yes, there are some miscellaneous things that didn’t go as planned, but it looks good. I think it plays as intended, though it is not a simple game to get down right away.

And, we hope to keep making it better – expanding the card pool, addressing any production issues, addressing rules questions and concerns.

Shifting gears. The John Carter KS continues on in a similar way to various other RPG [sic] KS’s that I’ve seen where the original threshold is just something to blow through for the stretch goals.

Now, what doesn’t get me as excited is that it’s not just a RPG KS but a minis KS as well. I don’t hate minis. I, in fact, backed a KS that was all about a board game with lots of minis. But, I also have essentially no use for them. I don’t know how to store them (and, I have way too much stuff already). I’m a theater of the mind style player/GM. I don’t hardly ever play games that require minis. I also don’t see how more “different dice” is actually a goal of any sort or worth anything. I want winners … er … I want content.

I got to thinking about content. First, JC content. There are nine books published based on various compiled magazine stories or whatever. Decent number of locations are used or referred to. Various cultures, as defined by races with different skin colors … uh … yeah, exist. Some monsters. Some tech. Some weird psionic style powers exist. There’s material. Now, how you finesse putting a book out that goes into the differences between the black martians, the white martians, the red martians, the yellow martians, and, maybe, someone very PC will also find the green martians a problem is not entirely clear to me. At least some of these have other names besides what color their skin is, but we live in a precarious age, which is no doubt some of the problem with pushing JC 100 years after it was written.

Putting aside the potential for getting people who don’t understand the source material riled up, I was just wondering why more RPG books weren’t part of the early stretch goals. Because, I think about how insane the material is for both Conan and L5R. Now, L5R is a game world, so you can expand it as much as you want. But, I’ve read a good amount of Conan and I don’t recall there being that many locations and cultures and whatever well defined to where you can write an entire book about Aquilonia or, even more ridiculous, Cimmeria or Khitai and somehow find it challenging to write an atlas of Barsoom. Maybe it isn’t challenging. Maybe it’s just not a priority compared to having ship to ship combat rules or whatever.

I happen to have Savage World’s Lankhmar book handy and I have repeatedly wondered why there’s so little material in it and/or the property. I haven’t read many stories, but I know there are a number, and I’m pretty sure they are more vivid than the game supplement.

But, then, I thought of a few things. One, not every estate is as eager to expand on material that isn’t in stories written by the original author or official authors. Two, Conan is different. Barsoom is a made up world. Lankhmar is in a made up world. Conan’s world is a world of historical cultures mashed together. You can expand on the societal norms of Shemites by just opening up an anthropological book. Want to get Hyrkanians? Well, not super challenging. Brythunia was a bit of an uncertain match, but I interpreted as kind of like Ireland and kind of like Poland and maybe something else.

Conan’s world so good. I can bring in famous Yemeni poets into my LBS gaming or Saudi festivals or whatever to flesh out that underdeveloped setting and find that entertains me as a worldbuilder. But, with Conan, you can choose any corner of the continent you want and draw inspiration from this world.

I just haven’t been as enthused with KS as the end/intended results of things I’ve backed or tried to back haven’t been to my tastes. Sure, I want to have PDFs for supplements rather than not, but what I really want are printed versions, and, yet, where would I even put more books? I can’t fit what I have in terms of either books or cards.

Speaking of Savage Worlds, we have started playing a Spelljammer game using SW mechanics. Still early. Not what I would pick as a person’s first RPG experience, but that’s the case. New setting for others. We have intentionally not proclaimed “this is our new RPG campaign” to see if it works for people. Is kind of interesting to me that my gaming seems to be expanding again, what with trying to play L5R LCG, Traveller, trying to have RPG play on a regular basis, plus Shadowfist getting back on track, the potential to get V:TES in the South Bay back on track.

Who mentions love in a blog post some almost seven months from Valentine’s Day? I’m that guy.

I avoid Pacificon because I don’t think it’s a good con and because I don’t think it treats GMs well. When Celesticon was around, I got to the point of avoiding both because they split the gamerbase and made everything too much effort for what weren’t particularly good experiences. I don’t have that justification anymore, yet I feel no particular desire to start attending Pacificon, which long long ago was my favorite of the local cons.

Close to the con, I was informed we were going to demo Traveller with actual sample cards. So, I dragged myself the ten minute walk to the con that I normally make just to go to dinner with my friends and got a weekend badge.

Hmmmmm … let’s see. I looked at the Conan RPG corebook for a bit. I watched Arkham whatever (they all run together in my mind since it seems like pretty much a money grab to just make another variation of the same game). I watched some AGoT 2e Boardgame play barely, glanced at some wargaming.

Mostly, I made myself available for demos. Jeff had run a con listed event on Friday, which attracted more interest than our plop ourselves down wherever we could find space demoing. Jeff and I talked about stuff, made some notes about next ship deck inclusions based on what we think the game could use more of.

It’s theoretically weird that I eschew saying much about Traveller here, but it does make more sense to post thoughts about the game on our website when we decide to launch it with content, which I expect to be soon.

No, the point of posting about the con is to give … insight … into my predilections, I guess I suppose. I’m willing to actively oppose the activity of playing games when I feel like it. I could have played Type P, but didn’t. I could have played boardgames, but didn’t. I could have suggested something, but didn’t. I could have pushed for us doing something with the Conan RPG once I had a better idea when I was going to be at the con, but didn’t.

And, yet, I consider what I do as an activity of gaming. Before I got into Shadowfist, some 20 years after it came out, I would watch people play because I knew the people. I also played every few years, but, mostly, I watched people play. I didn’t glean a ton from that, but I may have gleaned some tiny amount and I could have more-gleaned.

There are some games I ultraglean from watching. Then, there’s discussing.

As an aside, I don’t have much desire to watch V:TES games, as I find them frustrating to watch, much like I find watching pretty much any CCG I play frustrating. I realized why at the European Championships while talking to a Swedish player. For games I know, I want to point out what people are doing that doesn’t make sense to me. That totally doesn’t work. Yet, I’m perfectly happy to watch games I don’t know and seek just to learn because I don’t have opinions on what people should do. It’s not just CCGs, it just happens that CCGs are more likely to be games I know well enough to think I’m more brillianter than the people playing. I can tolerate watching mahjong being played better because I used to do that a lot and, possibly, because I don’t care as much whether people make good decisions in simpler games.

Discussing games can be far more fun than playing them. I never liked 1e A Game of Thrones Boardgame as a game, but I found it interesting as a puzzle. Since it wasn’t terribly random, what moves should you intend on making as each position? It’s like figuring out optimal moves for whatever boardgame given some particular set up. Like how people talk about chess and bridge, et al.

Obviously, terrible play can also make for good stories. I value my terrible RPG experiences for the ability to bitch about them forever. The “mostly the game consisted of shooting our own mechs” Mekton game that prevents me from playing Mekton locally, the “when do the PCs get to do something instead of watching the NPC do stuff” Maelstrom game that solidified the unbreakable law that Brad and I are not allowed to play in the same scheduled RPG events, the “yup, this is a pretty typical way people play D&D” D&D games that mean I never will sign up for D&D at any con, etc. all offer something besides con strategizing.

Similarly, awful CCG experiences can make for stories that I’m sure everyone is utterly fascinated to hear about many times in their ephemeral lives.

Had two meals with con-goers and shed some enlightenment upon them as to the Truth. What was that about not playing but still gaming? Oh, yeah, probably 99% of my True Dungeoning is not actually playing it but wondering whether to sleeve more tokens, deciding when to jump into auctions, and adding builds to the app for various different formats of play since I now have to have significantly different builds for normal versus hardcore/nightmare, possibly different builds for hardcore versus nightmare, different builds for Grind, and do this for a bunch of classes I probably won’t play but might.

I guess the point of this post is not just that, yes, Traveller is progressing and Pacificon annoys me, but that we do things that sound suboptimal because we care enough. Love, yo.

Extended credits: Couple of us are going to Gamehole Con to play True D/G. Since I both have real looking cards (and it would be very possible that I would have final print cards by November) and not anything to do in the mornings when there are no True D/G events, I expect to set up shop in open gaming or wherever and demo Traveller to those who wish to be exposed to a game so brilliant it like radiates UHEGRs or UHECRs or whatever (latter is more searchable if you don’t 说 my lingo).

Expanding educational opportunities and developing the international community is something far more noble than anything I spend my time on.

I did have some thoughts on gaming.

I played three games of Second Edition A Game of Thrones LCG yesterday. It got me thinking.

But, first, some comments on AGoT card games. I played the CCG when it was new. I was amazed at how similar it was structurally to Babylon 5 and looked at the designer credits only to not recognize the names. Not to say it played anything like B5 or Wheel of Time, but it was e-e-rie.

I hardly played in the next 15 years. I’ve not read any of A Song of Fire and Ice nor have I watched a complete episode. Nothing I’ve ever heard enthused me (okay, one thing I’ve heard about the TV series might interest a dude …).

These games were far more comprehensible than anything I had played previously. In part, that is likely due to each time I play I get more familiar with the strategies. I think it also helped that I wasn’t just suddenly handed a deck for an impromptu beatdown but knew I would be playing and was handed relatively simple decks (limited card pool).

So, I got to thinking. Not so much about AGoT. I got to thinking about decisions. Yup, decisions, again. I don’t mean deckbuilding decisions, though I whined about a deck I played not having enough economy and cheap characters.

The impact of decisions on play. Why do I find games like V:TES and Ultimate Combat! more fun than games like AGoT and L5R (card game)? Why do I kind of hate Outpost, yet find The Scepter of Zavandor to be like my favorite EuroBG?

Probably for multiple reasons, but it occurred to me that a reason could be that mistakes are far more forgiving in the games I prefer. Outpost is a game, in my experience, where, if you make one mistake, you are waiting for the game to end. Defend that province? Oh, sucks to be your lack of any characters. Don’t defend that province? Oh, economic shortfall ruins you.

Can put aside some of these games as not being terribly relevant to hardly anyone. Let’s bring V:TES into the discussion. You can lose a game by making a bad decision in the beginning. You definitely lose games by making bad decisions at the end (by you, I mean, a lot of people and me, or I would have had the first Abominations win and couldn’t have put Conditioning on my personal banned list). However, because there are so many players and the game isn’t a race (like B5), mistakes often not only go unpunished but provide advantages. Get Kissed by Ra early on? Hey, hang out in torpor for a bit and have people gang up on the table threat.

AGoT has always felt like a game where decisions mattered too much. Not that it’s alone. Magic makes me feel like decisions matter too much, which might not be the case if you drew more than one card a turn.

I don’t just look to be able to play odd decks (aka forgiving deck construction) but also look to be able to enjoy playing without the pressure of always having to make an optimal decision. Oh, gee, note why I don’t like chess. The randomness of card draw with hidden information feed the idea that you aren’t always going to make the correct decision.

Note how this angle on game features ties into how I’m not really that into playing Dragon Dice or CMGs, where there’s a lack of hidden information and the randomness is still calculable.

Branching off into RPGs, why I got so annoyed with Conan d20’s lack of viable character builds is that a poor decision just assigning attributes was crippling. Meanwhile, the much less rigid [sic!!] character building of L5R has always appealed to me. Yup, L5R less suicidal character creation than Conan – that’s molybdenumic. Yes, Stamina 4, Willpower 2, with Intelligence 3, and Spears 4 is probably going to feel masochistic, but you can get out from under this awful by leveling off Earth and “remembering” that you are a Boar who Mai Chongs like mad. Or, if not a bushi, can find some excuse to Multiple Schools into shugenjahood.

Some people are into the intensity that can come with gaming. I’m not. I want to be able to guess what to do and, while that may mean I lose, at least I still have a chance to come from 25 points down in the second half while not having shown the ability to stop the run.

I haven’t checked in to Kickstarter for a while. After backing Age of Legends, Conan, Aquelarre, I could use the break.

I did back Ninja Crusade 2e’s expansion Kickstarter, but it didn’t fund. It did relaunch. It’s already funded. The game sounds like my sort of thing, in that I’ve played 1e and wasn’t that thrilled with the mechanics but like the sound of 2e’s changes. Where Feng Shui ended up being a huge disappointment because it focused on things I didn’t care about and ignored addressing things I did, to the point where I consider 1e a better game for campaign play, I have hopes based on the description of the ethos the game is going for. Since I missed the initial 2e launch, I’m mostly backing for getting the 2e corebook. I doubt the stretch goal will hit, but that would be more useful to me than worrying about expansion materials.

In other realms, there’s a bit lacking in reins. Nothing is really holding my attention outside of my latest fixation.

I’m well aware that I’ve always been this way – enthused by the latest thing I turn my weary gaze to. When I play a campaign, it’s typically the campaign. When I play a CCG weekly (or playtest or design), it’s typically the CCG. But, the interest in V:TES is weak, Shadowfist is very undemanding (which is a good thing), Nightmare War isn’t moving very quickly and HoR4 will likely have the same experience of waiting around for the next session.

Wandering mentally has had the effect of getting me to reread some books (well, parts of them I find more appealing). It’s interesting how I’ll come back to a novel after N+ years and find a different take on things. There is a series that I read the first book for and found it in my wheelhouse, in that I would read modern supernatural stuff. I never got the second book. Skimming through it, I now think it’s rather … not so great. I guess I realized that at the time.

See, it uses astrology, which you may realize I find a rich vein for fiction. But, it just isn’t cool enough. The writing now seems extremely repetitive. The world just isn’t all that.

I kept up with Anita Blake stuff for ages because the world was just so interesting from book one. Of course, it got sillier, though the world was not as much of an issue as the way the main character was handled.

I skimmed through one of the Deryni books I had only read a couple of times or so. Far more engaging. What I took away, though, since it was familiar ground, was just how different from a FRPG campaign it would be. It’s political, whether religion politics, politics politics, or relationship politics. One could analyze early books from later books and maybe say that the series has moved away from action and toward soap opera. But, I don’t recall a tremendous amount of action in earlier books and I don’t recall caring about much of it, anyway.

Whether hinting at l33t swording by Morgan or energy battles, just not the draw. If anything, the incredible stupidity on the parts of the protagonists in how they use their powers is a frustrating distraction from what’s often pleasant drama. (I especially have a hard time with any of the books involving Camber because of how dark they get and how easily wizards can own non-wizards if they bother to.)

I did come away, though, with a bit of a new view. Maybe I’m just really crotchety, but there’s too much “[blank] is the greatest of them all” to characters. I’m not looking for flawed types who agonize through life. I just don’t need people to constantly express how great someone else is. Should be more subtle. Can convey that someone is respected in all of the 11 Kingdoms without actually having one character state to another character how the person is respected by all.

Of course, this is from someone who can’t even write a short story to submit for publishing. But, opinions are why blogs are written.

Speaking of opinions, Flash and Arrow premiered.

As I read reviews’ comments, my opinions feel like a rehash, but here we go, anyway.

Both series suffer from repeating annoying things. That doesn’t make them bad, though I wouldn’t call Arrow good – Flash still has enough humor to be good.

Some folks commenting on Arrow are all thrilled by going back to a season one feel. Um, look, I found it interesting when the series opened with Oliver murdering people left and right, but to go back to that undermines the supposed character development in later seasons. I like better action, but I’m still not feeling it. What was better in season one was the sense that characters were actually doing something interesting. Even if the filming of action is less bad recently, it still feels like people going through the motions. What was appealing was how Oliver and The Hood felt like the same justice warrior, not Oliver’s relationship problems and Green Arrow’s bow parries.

Then, Flash’s repetitive superspeed fights is repetitive.

But, back to Arrow. So, so tired of Oliver having to navigate relationships. What made for the best scenes in season one were the surprising interactions with folks. Let me pull my shirt down to show you I’m Bratva. Let me speak foreign languages to maids, et al. Let me try to keep my secret in the most flimsy way possible from techbabe. Oliver the outsider who plays by special rules so much better than Oliver the “oh look, I’m angst-ridden”. Thea has her moments but is too slight to be credible as a super and too slight to be eye candy, Diggle is nowhere near as interesting to me as he is to a bunch of others, same with Lance. If anyone, have Katrina Law be in more episodes, but don’t turn her into something else, even though that already started – she was so good early on.

What wasn’t all that was the family drama, the friend drama, the girlfriend drama. Those things are old. Be novel, or, at least, be short story.

Flash, meanwhile, has gone the same route of dipping into the well of time babble. Just stop. Find something creative to do. I’m not saying avoid using superpowers, since I actually find superpowers more interesting in superheroes than lack of superpowers. For instance, what’s a fight between two speedsters? It’s a bunch of punching and kicking and pushing and throws and tossing stuff. Gee, that sounds like a fight between two bricks or two martial artists (without cool martial arts moves, which Arrow did better in season one). Now, there’s a problem. Psionics is not interesting, probably even less so in TV. Brick versus speedster can often be problematic interaction. Teleporter versus speedster is awfully like speedster versus speedster.

Flash is more appealing because the characters are more appealing. Harrison was amazing early on, still good. Cisco may be a tad too forced sometimes but mostly good. Some of the combinations work out well. Course, swapping Felicity and Iris on the two shows could be so much better than the relationship slogs we’ve had to endure, as one of Oliver’s best moments involved Iris’s take on him, where Felicity and Barry always was at least decent.

I’m curious as to how Supergirl will go now that it can be better integrated. I don’t really look that forward to it because it focuses too much on romance. You know, as someone who actually likes romance in things, it’s not necessary to be beaten over the head with how it has to be a source of conflict. There are other paths to go. I’m also less clear what the show should be about.

Legends of Tomorrow actually ended on a higher note, though LoT is really all about certain characters doing fun things.

That’s the thing. Superhero shows should be about doing fun things. Make amusing use of powers. Have conversations full of double meanings due to secret identities. Fire boxing glove arrows. Salmon that ladder (aka focus on training). But, more than anything else, do crossovers because you get out of the quagmires of your own angst and just do fun stuff. Nyssa showing up is like a crossover. I do look forward to the Supergirl/other crossover, hopefully with Mayor Handsome being on her list of guys she can make an exception for.

Other than spending way too much time thinking or transacting for True Dungeon, my focus recently has been on creating a card game. At some point, I assume I’ll talk about it here, but it’s an actual business venture unlike the solitaire games I’ve written about.

The draw, i.e. the charm.

I’ve written about what I’ve enjoyed about various CCGs. Maybe I just cover the same ground, maybe not. The intent is to not get into what makes the game good but what made it charming to me.

Ultimate Combat!

The flow of the game. I have never cared particularly about the techniques. I often try to avoid playing with Speed and Strength even though I’m a monstrous fan of how advantages work in the game. There’s just something about how the cards play out in many a game where the math becomes enjoyable. You don’t need to think too deeply or track a bunch of text. Hmmm … you … don’t … need … to … track … a … bunch … of … text. I hadn’t thought about how different that is, before. Welp, guess there was value in writing this post, after all.

Magic

Aesthetics. Not just card art. Use of components in mechanics. Color pie. Multicolor. Non-basic lands. Creature types. I just like looking at Magic cards even for sets that I never want to play with (Innistrad).

That, and potential. Magic is far more complex than UC!, which isn’t necessarily better, but it does mean that there’s so much more potential for things you can do. You can build more meaningful theme decks. You can build all sorts of Johnny decks. With Magic, much more than other games, you can take one card and consider how you might use it.

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle

What attracted me early on, the Vampire: The Masquerade stuff of clans and disciplines, isn’t what attracts me to playing these days. Yet, this post is what charms games have, not how much I can revel in silliness.

Disciplines are all about transient effects. I like how UC! is mostly about transient effects, latched on to events in Babylon 5, etc., so I’m a transientophile. But, I knew what the disciplines were about in the RPG. I had my preferences, sometimes carried over, sometimes didn’t. Hate Dominate in the RPG to where my Tremere and Ventrue characters had zero dots between them. I keep saying it because it’s so weird for me to like things that are powerful (well, that’s just reputation and not really true but sorta, kinda), but I like playing Dominate in the CCG.

I was far more into clans back when the cardpool was smaller and there were fewer and before I got fixated on how unbalanced the clans were or how tedious it could be to see people play the same stuff over and over.

I like the five-player game for how I can develop slowly and still be relevant, for how there are no clear ways to play against your opponents until things become distorted. Three-player can be playable, but I never look forward to it. Four player really only has going for it that it’s faster than five-player, when you want to get games finished.

Babylon 5

Theme. I do a lot of mechanical themes, so I’m not talking just about Narn Shadow Intrigue or whatever (even though that’s somewhat of a mechanical theme).

I built virtually no decks that used Refa as my starting character. I actually don’t really remember one such deck, so it’s possible that I didn’t build any, even while playtesting. Londo promoting Babylon 5, Londo watching the Centauri Fleets murder everyone (well, not really, my military decks were almost always about racing to victory as fast as possible, so it was more like Fleet Week even before Show the Colors got printed), Chosen of Gaim/Drazi/whatever wasn’t Chosen of Squid cheese – these were things that entertained me.

I’ve mentioned before how I like fleet enhancements. For some reason, I just really like military decks and fleets, even though the show isn’t that much about such things (and Vorlon/Shadow fleets are dumb in the game). But, why fleet enhancements, which generally sucked? I also enjoyed putting stuff on characters, like guns on any character. There’s something about building up things in B5 that I don’t often enjoy in other CCGs. I think it’s because I feel more of a connection to cards on a narrative level.

Wheel of Time

Card representation of book elements. While I argued about stats for B5 cards, I was never as into B5 as other people were. I wasn’t even particularly into B5 until I got heavily into the card game. I played B5 because it was put out by Precedence Publishing, which put out my favorite RPG (at the time).

I didn’t know anything about WoT when Precedence decided it was going to publish the CCG. I got caught up. Fast. I had the advantage that the series was some five books in or whatever when I started reading them, which meant I wasn’t waiting years to find out what happened next.

I didn’t just design cards, I designed cards. I did art requests. I hunted up flavor text. Birgitte was awesome at the time before she got relegated to boring background stuff. I had submitted multiple versions of her card. I used one or two of her lines from the books as email sigs. Much like B5, there was a connection between source material and cards, but there was a difference. With B5, I enjoyed more spoofing on the source material. With WoT, I was more fanboyish, looking to highlight those things I liked out of the books. When we were testing Illian decks after Dark Prophecies, I eschewed them, as I just didn’t care anything about the Council of Nine or what sort of military they had.

Precedence may not have been perfect when it came to CCGs, but there was something done right when it came to translating source material into cards, even decks.

Shadowfist

I don’t know that Tomb Raider, Netrunner, Tempest of the Gods, or the likes held my interest enough to point out charms. Shadowfist I picked up very late because it had negative elements to me.

I’m not a crossgenre fan, in general. I don’t like games that seem random. A lot of card effects, like Mole Network, Bite of the Jellyfish, Imprisoned, Nerve Gas, Neutron Bomb, etc. just weren’t fun to me. Mass destruction was particularly unappealing to me for a long time because of also comparing with Wrath of God and Armageddon in Magic.

I’ve mentioned some of the appeal to me, nowadays. The RPG made me care about the world, so the crossgenre issue was defeated.

Oddly, V:TES helped defeat my issue with mass destruction. V:TES is a game where permanents can get overly permanenty. While plenty of games see things that stick in Shadowfist, plenty of games see nothing safe.

Does UC! appeal to my interest in martial arts? Maybe? Once upon a time. I don’t really consider the martial arts aspects of the game these days. Shadowfist does a better job of connecting to the sorts of things that cause me to take interest in seeing martial arts shows, presently.

With every CCG, there’s something to dislike. For some reason, I enjoy characters far more in Shadowfist than the equivalent in other games. Usually, I’m about events in CCGs, whether they are instants, advantages/actions, reactions, or whatever. Some of the reason I lowball events in Shadowfist has nothing to do with not wanting decks full of stoppage but just because I find characters more charming than events. Weird.

I think more than anything else that allowed me to embrace Shadowfist was the contrast with other CCGs. I wasn’t invested emotionally. I didn’t care if it was balanced. I didn’t have any favorites (well, I do like some factions better than others, but didn’t come in with having favorite cards). I didn’t need to be able to build every deck. And, so forth. It was something novel for me as a CCG experience.

Horizon

So, the card game I’m doing design/development for. Will it charm people? Will it draw upon the source material enough to create a connection, have a good dynamic, flow well, produce satisfying results? I think one of the partners sent the playtest materials out, so might be soon to see how other people buy into something rather than my write about what I buy into.

Time to opine. Deep delve on True Dungeon. My take on tokens (and, maybe, whatever).

On the one hand, I’m a 4th level player. On the other, I went eight years without playing and have never done more than two runs in a year.

Then, I’ve never transmuted a token as the recipes always sounded way too hard to accomplish, though this should change in the next six months due to transmutes moving down to rarities I exist in; I didn’t even know trade items were a thing until this year’s Gen Con.

Is it analogous to my Shadowfist situation where I know about things but lack practical experience, putting me in a rather odd class?

I have rather biased biases. I’m a Wizard (assuming Andy is around to suck up Druid, the only other class I would really enjoy, though Bard is my fourth thought … I hate weapon combat, Samhain I amhain … fifth thought is Paladin who just Guards and heals). I don’t care about nuking monsters, as I prefer shuffleboarders to feel victorious in their smiting.

Casual Calculus

What do casual players want? You know, the “I sign up for puzzle at normal level and don’t bother learning anything about shuffleboard even when I’m a fighty dude” types.

.1 Surviving

I don’t actually rate surviving the 7th room, anymore, from an analytical standpoint. Still get the same number of XP, either way, and 7th rooms are vastly more deadly than other rooms, so characters bite it. Though, I still prefer surviving to not by some degree.

Some folks vastly prefer surviving to get the Survivor badge.

But, let’s not dwell too much on that – it’s just notable that people want to survive the 7th room as a tack on to what really matters.

Nothing matters more than surviving to the 7th room, in my experience. Dying is boring. Dying is embarrassing. Less than 1000 XP is sad panda. Just all around antifun.

What’s the best way not to die? Unlike how it may be for Grinders or Nightmarers or whatever who need to murder monsters before they murder characters, for us normal puzzle types, the greatest boons are more HP and more healing. Even a few HP is huge, potentially large. There were truedungeon.com forum posts about how people didn’t realize how popular Charms of Health was going to be. Charm of Health is actually pretty solid in my uneducated opinion, as it’s puzzle damage and push damage that is going to produce Casual-ties (TM, R, P). The amount of damage is low, but, then, so are the HP for we wizards.

.2 Treasuring

Everyone wants to feel like they get more stuff. TD is superexpensive. Everyone feels less good about themselves when other people are more plentiful, richer, avaricefuller.

TD is crazy with how much money there is in it from the playerbase. It’s model is perhaps not so much CCG (except outlier models like original Star Wars, Dragonball Z, and even Wheel of Time after a certain point) as it is videogames of the MMO sort. I don’t do MMOs, so I’m speaking only truths here, but the grinding for elite drops is totally something I see more as MMO than as CCG.

TD doesn’t even try to pretend tokens are balanced. Many a CCG where there were obvious imbalances still pretended that rares weren’t just strictly better than less rares. The whole nature of TD is that an incremental, one might say linear, gain is accompanied by an astronomical uplift in secondary market value. I can have a rare that gives +1 to stuff you care about for a few bucks become an ultrarare +2 that goes for more than $100 that becomes a transmuted +3 for $300+, etc.

I’m not trying to scare people off. What makes TD so weird is that the power gains are only relevant to certain types of players that may comprise a significant amount of the people doing runs but also are rare in my runs. I can play a Wizard or Elf Wizard with exactly zero tokens and expect to get through a puzzle normal. What’s likely to kill me is a group being bad at puzzles or the healers not getting enough opportunities to mend me.

But, everyone likes more treasure. I had dreams of Roguery. I have no interest anymore, even though it’s more loot.

What’s disturbing is the variance in treasure draws. I believe the current cap is 17 draws, with that about to go up. This year made a casual player friendly decision to ensure everyone got … 3 draws.

Yeah, I’m one of those newbites who got 3 draws when one (and only one) player in one of our groups had 12. This is obviously tolerable, in that TD is doing fine, but, mathematically, this is nuts. If I were setting a range, the range would be between 100% and 200% because I believe in these United States, Superman 1, and pistachio pie. Yup, it would not have occurred to me that someone should get five times as many draws as the starting point. Plus one would have been a huge deal and +2 the wasp’s elbows.

There are plenty of discussions of the potential problems of constantly upping the limit. I’m only entering into taking TD seriously and I wonder about a bubble bursting, not because I’m anti one-percenter but because of the ability to farm treasure and the potential economic value a farmer gains from buying up event tickets and crowding out newbites, who just want to recite palindromes.

Obviously, treasure that helps keep a newbite alive is a thing. But, what other treasures are newbite friendly? Not uncommons. Nothing makes 99%ers feel more 99%ed than playing the lottery. Wait, that’s not remotely true. Anyway, uncommons are sigh worthy. GP rares, which, notably are worth more than other rares in many cases, are not newbite friendly. Newbites like magic weapons and armor. How do I know? My entire take on combat is “show me where Ethereal is” and I’ve been excited by the idea of having magic arms/armor, though less so once I realized I was going to Wizardize almost all of the time.

Everyone wants “you know, you can sell that for $250 on eBay” treasures, so that’s not very exciting as a newbite decision. It’s these sorts of upper tier draws that make the race for ultimate draw power appealing.

That Lenses of Fortune and the 2017 rare cap someone at 4 draws just seems so wrong. I get it because rares actually have very little value most of the time. But, when you can start lending out treasure enhancers to farm off of other people’s runs, is it necessary to be so blatant about the class structure?

Anyway, have to move on at some point. The discussion around treasure is a difficult one that many are agonizing about.

.3 Beatdown

Casual players want to feel useful or have the blackjack moment. We had a group where the Paladin didn’t have a ranged weapon, so he had nothing to do but Guard somebody. Having someone come in and eviscerate all enemies while everyone else knouts around is not particularly fun for many, either. Sure, if it’s a matter of winning or losing, I’m in the win camp, but it’s far cooler when a one-packer kills something.

Powerful but subtle effects aren’t that great for the newbite. Does a newbite care at all about changing fire damage to shock damage? I’m all about the burn and don’t remotely care.

Note that beatdown just means contributing usefully. Of course, I have a passive, defensive personality, but, for instance, I only plan on having one token that increases my spell damage by one. I’m far more interested in ultrarares or whatever that give Constitution bonuses. Contrast this with how many posts on the forums are about maxing out damage for different classes. I’m not going to turn down Boots of the Four Winds, but I’m also not PYPing (Pick Your Purple) the Winds Boots to transmute.

.4 Relevancy

Besides not dying and being able to weaponize something, any effects that eliminate the character as relevant to the challenge are fun inhibiting. I looked up how wands work and they require command words, so Silence effects stop that, as well. As a Wizard whose tokens were barely better than none at all, I’m both bored and feeling like I’m letting team newbite down while Silenced. Sure, it makes other people’s builds more relevant and the combats more interesting. For us, where the shuffleboarders were not mediumcore, it just made it that much more likely we were going to lose while some people waited to be relevant.

Given how much saves are a concern to posters, there are likely all sorts of other effects that just make you useless. I know I’ve always carried both a mirror and a Stone to Flesh scroll because of one year’s Medusa. From watching the video on what the rooms were for the combat runs this year at GC, seems like certain effects could make the unprepared unproductive. I get that a straightforward slidefest is repetitive. I’m just saying that newbites seem quite vulnerable to any sort of control effects.

.0

Note that the casual player is not prioritizing being a 5th level character. Though, that’s possibly due to ignorance. As soon as I understood how to be a 5th level character, that became one of two priorities along with getting more than 3 treasure draws.

Pick Your Poison (Damage Booster)

TD is not healthy for me. I like collecting. I like chasing. I like having things other people don’t. I also like having some sort of retirement plan and the ability to go to European Championships for V:TES if they don’t schedule them close to my brother’s wedding. TD is so far beyond any money madness I saw in CCGs. Sure, Magic had cards that went for $100+, $400, then $1,000, or whatever. TD has people advertise $1,000+ tokens that are just something people will include in their posts about their character builds.

I have a tendency to get into things much deeper than any sort of original concept. I’m worried that even considering how to allay the cost of $8,000 bundles crosses my mind.

To play something twice a year.

That’s incroyable.

Nevermind that the fun isn’t in kicking ass, that the fun of not dying before the 7th room is not terribly difficult to achieve with some healing management, that I would humiliate myself if I ever got a planar skill test wrong with the new, dumbed down Wizard board so I’m consistently doing 6 or 11 damage.

Oh, and that’s if I can even play twice a year. What if Gen Con sells out slots I can play in because I’m busy with Heroes of Rokugan or screw up registering for events in the first second they open or am too lazy to wait list on a run or look for refunded tickets on my phone?

Since Gen Con, the thing I’ve been thinking of the most gamingwise is TD. Yikes!

What Else?

Variance of information is huge even though the economy is mature enough that killer eBay deals don’t seem all that common.

Lot of the forum threads are meaningless to me as I don’t debate whether latest ultrarare is BiS (I assume this means best in slot). That so many spend so much time arguing that something new won’t see play because it’s not as good as something else is … … … you know, kind of like a lot of arguments about CCG cards, so, as crazy as I think it is to constantly run down some ultrarare that a lot of people would love to own (without sinking $150 into owning it), I guess it is rational to worry about the “tournament” level of the game.

Would I go to the other two cons to play? That’s hard. After Gen Con, I currently rate Origins as the other US con I’d fly to. There’s a reason HoR is far less meaningful to me than a bunch of people in the middle of the country.

I talked about things related to it, but I wonder if a middle class of TD actually exists. Oh, I’m sure there are other people at my level. I just don’t know that it’s a significant enough part of the population to matter. Seems like TD lives off of a not tiny group who sink thousands into the game and a bunch of people who barely have any sort of collection who just want to play a different sort of game.

Well, I’m sure I’ll have more to talk about later. Hopefully, get those two runs in next Gen Con without screwing up my RPG schedule.